Editing the library scene

During one of our recent editing sessions, I made the following changes.

For the alleyway scene, we have to potential clips to use, and the one which we are most likely to use was a little wobbly, so I first applied stabilisation. However, this made the footage appear very blurry, so I reverted it back to how it was.

The next thing was a very simple step, I simply added a transition after the last library scene shot so that it fades to black, ready for the titles sequence.

While watching the library footage, I thought that it was actually quite boring, so I decided to try and change the colours to demonstrate the character's perception of the events unfolding, adding some dynamics to their personalities on screen.

For all shots watching our protagonists, and before she starts having a fit, I changed the white balance to a blue tone and reduced the saturation slightly, to make it appear like an average dreary day, where nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Once our protagonists starts showing odd behaviour, I wanted to make this difference very clear to the audience, increase the exposure, saturation and contrast dramatically, to show the very unpleasant experience the protagonist is showing, and offering the audience an idea of what it is like.

I had two different settings depending on whether the camera was facing the protagonist's face, or a POV shot was being used. For the POV shots I again increased the exposure levels, contrast and saturation, but decided to increase the saturation even further. For all of these shots the white balance was normal.

Using this image and the one above you can compare the subtle but still noticeable differences between the colours, also the hints of red indicate the protagonist's slight panic in realising she has been watched.

After changing the colours, I noticed that our timeline didn't quite follow through, we watched Cloe's character watch the protagonist after she had actually moved along the bookcase, so I decided to use cross cutting editing to change this.

I split the clip and placed the close up shot either side of the establishing shot of the protagonist walking along beside the bookcase.

I felt like the editing session was very productive and hopefully will be able to incorporate the different colour schemes elsewhere in the trailer to portray the different perceptions of situations and make the trailer a little more original and interesting to watch.